Legend of Calgary artist Lewis grows as more music discovered from elusive cult hero

A picture for the album cover shoot for L’Amour from the mysterious Lewis, a.k.a. former Calgarian Randall Wulff. Courtesy, Ed Colver

It’s hard not to be a wee bit skeptical.

In this day and age, where everything is calculated and even the word “reality” is a specious and debatable thing, it’s difficult to fully believe a homegrown musical tale with international interest — especially one that features intrigue, at least two lost treasures, several pseudonyms, an L.A. photo shoot, a bounced cheque, locales that span the globe, blond models, a private jet and a mysterious figure who has all but vanished from the face of the Earth.

It seems too perfect, and too perfectly insane, not to be a concocted marketing ploy or some sort of Catfish meets Searching for Sugar Man fictional mash-up.

But all parties involved insist the strange story of one-time Calgary stock broker, now cult musician Randall Aldon Wulff is entirely legit.

“I can totally understand how you’d feel that way,” says American journalist Jack D. Fleischer with a laugh. “It is a very peculiar thing and one of those cases where I feel like truth is stranger than fiction ...

“(And) the fact that we still have a lot of details left hanging in the wind is definitely compelling.”

Here’s what we do know or the tale as it’s been thus spun: Several years ago Edmonton record collector Jon Murphy discovered an album in a bin at a flea-market that was closing down. The record was credited to a man named Lewis and titled L’Amour and released on the previously unknown R.A.W. record label in 1983. Murphy passed it along to friend Aaron Levin of the Weird Canada blog, who began to champion the pretty, soft, lush lounge-folk of the unknown Lewis, and his name and the music began to spread among music fans over the web and in dubbed CD copies.

Eventually it made its way to L.A.-based Fleischer who was likewise charmed by it, and he brought it to the attention of U.S. indie label Light In the Attic — one that specializes in reissues, including, yes, Rodriguez, the subject of the aforementioned Sugar Man doc — who he says fell in love with the album and the story, or lack thereof, and “just thought it was an incredibly special thing.”

So much so that they wanted to reissue it. But to do that, they needed to track down “Lewis,” and there were very few credits on the record, among them a presumably bogus dedication of L’Amour to Christie Brinkley and that of noted West Coast punk photographer Ed Colver who was responsible for the cover. Colver recalled the shoot, but named the man as Randall Wulff, who was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a model girlfriend, and whose $250 cheque for the photos bounced after Wulff, allegedly, skipped town to Las Vegas, then Hawaii.

The trail to Mr. Wulff, though, eventually led back up to Canada, where a private investigator who the label had hired discovered that the musician had grown up in Calgary, and had been a stock broker during the boom of the late-’70s and early ’80s. Family weren’t willing to really discuss him much — save for a nephew now teaching at the University of Victoria who had vague recollections of his uncle living in a home with all white furniture. Even a 2010 obituary for Wulff’s mother that appeared in the Herald omits any mention of Randall.

His two brothers, according to the label, haven’t seen him for around a decade, had no idea of his whereabouts — their last sighting was in Vancouver — but thought the label releasing the record and keeping Wulff’s profits in escrow was a “neat idea.” Light In the Attic did just that earlier this year, with liner notes from Fleischer that recounted the wonderfully odd backstory to match the wonderfully odd music, while still allowing for continued speculation and conjecture among fans.

“I love the music, I love (L’Amour) a lot, I’ve listened to it for years ... ,” says collector, musician and owner of local label Mammoth Cave Records Evan Van Reekum, who had been keeping an eye out for an original copy of the record and who had been doing his own digging into Wulff’s background.

“But at this point I’m so enamoured with the story, above and beyond even the music ... It’s all so wild. Me being one of these people, but people are really into that these days, the story. And that’s always traditionally been one of the coolest things about music, biographies or learning about people’s lives or what inspired them to make this kind of music.”

Well, luckily or serendipitously or conveniently, there was much more story to come. And more music.

“In the process of doing (L’Amour), we had a friend of the label in Vancouver (Kevin Howes) go and talk to the studio where (we discovered) Randall was making recordings in the late ’90s, under the pseudonym R.J. Duke,” says Fleischer. “And then about a month later our friend, Kevin, he’s a record dealer, he was in storage unit and was going through LPs that he had bought probably 10 years ago and thought that it was just all a pile of junk and just stuffed in a corner, and he was just randomly going through, and he pulled out Romantic Times. And was like, ‘Oh wait a minute, that’s the guy I was just at the studio for.’ ”

That album, attributed to Lewis Baloue, was recorded two years after L’Amour in Calgary’s old Thunder Road Studios, and its existence had previously gone undetected by collectors now hep to the Lewis name, as well as Internet sleuths and even actual private detectives. Naturally, Light In the Attic was excited, and was in the process of secretly readying Romantic Times for reissue, when, again, miraculously and remarkably, Inglewood used music mecca Recordland unearthed its own copy.

“It was so funny the way it happened,” says Van Reekum of the discovery, which came about three weeks ago, about a week after the Vancouver revelation. “There was about 30 boxes of beat-up records and Al (Cohen, one of Recordland’s owners) reached into one box and pulled out two records and said, ‘Look at all this crap.’ And he pulled out both of the Lewis albums. It was like a dream come true, one of those amazing collector’s moments that you live for.”

He laughingly admits that he tried to “play it cool. I grabbed both of them and put them on the shelf. And I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to get out of here with this.’ ”

Cohen quickly figured it out and began looking into that second “lost” Lewis album.

“There was no information on the Internet whatsoever about it and he’s been fairly known now for a few years ... and still nobody knew about that record,” says Cohen. “It’s pretty crazy. And there is even the copyright information for it on the copyright website and nobody found it before. It’s pretty weird.”

So, too, was the timing of his discovery, especially considering that Calgary is, what he calls, the “epicentre of Lewis records,” and he had never before come across a copy. But Cohen is quick to dispel any conspiracy notions that it was somehow recently planted.

“I can guarantee that the spot where I found the Lewis records was guaranteed untouched by human hands for 15 years at least,” he says. “Unless somebody mined their way in their and put it in there between some Billy Joel and Elton John records — I don’t know how.”

Cohen, aware of the L’Amour reissue, immediately contacted Light In the Attic, who told him they were aware and working on getting the new find out, putting the Recordland owner in touch with a buyer so he could deal quietly and directly with him. When that fell through, Cohen knew what he had was too good and too rare to hold onto.

“We had been keeping it a surprise because we had wanted it to be this great unveiling,” Fleischer laughs. “And then the guy goes and he puts it on eBay, and we were like, ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got to tell everybody.’ ”

The result is that Light In the Attic has now put a rush on releasing Romantic Times — a much weirder, incredibly bizarre album, but still obviously Wulff — with digital copies now available, the CD release set for Aug. 26 and the new LP pressings due Nov. 18.

The news certainly didn’t hurt Recordland’s eBay sale of the original, as, after furious bidding, this week it sold for $1,800 to a collector who wished to remain anonymous.

And, again, in keeping with the craziness, Cohen has discovered yet another copy among the millions of records they have in storage. Perhaps also among them will be an even greater find, one that will further the legend of Randall Wulff.

As well as finding out about those Vancouver recordings in the late ’90s — the label is currently negotiating to get the tapes from the West Coast studio — apparently Fleischer says they’ve also discovered that the artist did some recording in Europe in the early ’90s and released some albums, although they’ve yet to find them.

“What pseudonym it would be under and how we would get ahold of these things, probably the only way would be if people would experience this reissue and connect the dots to something they’d seen in a record store. That’s the best that I could guess or hope for,” Fleischer says. “But, yeah, there’s more.”

And as for the man, himself, well, in keeping with the nature of the tale, Fleischer says he’s yet to come forward and all of their efforts to locate one Randall Aldon Wulff have met with dead ends. But, again, perhaps that’s fitting.

“I like mystery,” he says, noting he’s curious to see if this newspaper story in Wulff’s hometown offers any more clues. “If Randall is around and wants to embrace his new fans, I think it could be also exciting for him, too. I mean, clearly a life devoted to music and mostly in isolation. It could be great.

“But I just don’t know what to expect.”

From a fan’s perspective, Van Reekum admits he’s not entirely convinced the label and Fleischer haven’t actually found the artist and are either waiting or respecting his wishes to not be identified or located. But he’s also doing his own part to reach out to Wulff, setting up an e-mail account (asboatsgoby@gmail.com) he hopes will yield more tips and maybe answers.

“If he doesn’t know about this, I just feel that he needs to know,” says Van Reekum, who finally got that LP copy of L’Amour, when Cohen sold it to him for $100, a fraction of what it goes for online. “And that’s the motivation for finding him, a musician or an artist deserves to know that their music is all of a sudden very sought after. I’m sure that he would want to know.”

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